"Twenty eight florins a month is a huge price to pay, for a man to stand between you and the Wild.Twenty
eight florins a month is nowhere near enough when a wyvern's jaws snap
shut on your helmet in the hot stink of battle, and the beast starts to
rip the head from your shoulders. But if standing and fighting is hard,
leading a company of men - or worse, a company of mercenaries - against
the smart, deadly creatures of the Wild is even harder.It takes all the advantages of birth, training, and the luck of the devil to do it.The
Red Knight has all three, he has youth on his side, and he's determined
to turn a profit. So when he hires his company out to protect an Abbess
and her nunnery, it's just another job. The abby is rich, the nuns are
pretty and the monster preying on them is nothing he can't deal with.Only it's not just a job. It's going to be a war. ."

The Red Knight is a highly touted Gollancz (October, UK) and Orbit (December US) fantasy debut; it is a (sort of) pseudonymous novel by a noted historical fiction author who lives in Toronto and is a well known reenactor too and it jumped a few notches in my interest to my top-top place of the awaited books of 2012, when led by some Goodreads questions, I started checking the above information...

THE fantasy debut of the year for me and an asap read the moment I manage to get a copy!

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"The fascinating
characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have
all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and
new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They
cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They
travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

With rich
historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan
Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the
Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have
profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving
history for restless times"

Astray is a new book of interest from the author of the superb Room with a blurb that makes me want to try it as soon as I get a chance.

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"An intoxicating blend of noir crime, science fiction and fantasy THE LAST CITY is BLADE RUNNER meets PERDIDO STREET STATION.

Scorpia
– the last city of Aquais – where the Ar Antarians rule, the
machine-breeds serve and in-between a multitude of races and species eke
out an existence somewhere between the ever-blazing city lights and the
endless darkness of the underside.

As a spate of murders and
abductions grip the city, new recruit Silho Brabel is sent to the Oscuri
Trackers, an elite military squad commanded by the notorious Copernicus
Kane. But Silho has a terrible secret and must fight to hide her
strange abilities and monstrous heritage.

As the team delve deeper into Scorpia’s underworld, they discover a nightmare truth.

Hunted
by demons, the Trackers must band together with a condemned fugitive, a
rogue wraith and a gangster king and stake their lives against an
all-powerful enemy to try to save their world and one another"

A small press July novel, The Last City had some intriguing reviews and a great Amazon price so I got it a week or so ago despite the sample being only ok'ish, not the "I want this now" kind and its seeming resemblance to the Cast series by Michelle Sagara in which I stalled after a some 50 pages from volume 1... I plan to give it a serious try soon and will report back here!

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"In 1904, as the
Russo-Japanese War deepened, Asia was parceled out to rising powers and
the Korean empire was annexed by Japan. Facing war and the loss of their
nation, more than a thousand Koreans left their homes to seek
possibility elsewhere—in unknown Mexico.

After a long sea
voyage, these emigrants—thieves and royals, priests and soldiers,
orphans and entire families—disembark with the promise of land. Soon
they discover the truth: they have been sold into indentured servitude.

Aboard ship, an orphan, Ijeong, fell in love with the daughter of a
noble; separated when the various haciendados claim their laborers, he
vows to find her. After years of working in the punishing heat of the
henequen fields, the Koreans are caught in the midst of a Mexican
revolution. Some flee with Ijeong to Guatemala, where they found a New
Korea amid Mayan ruins.

A tale of star-crossed love, political turmoil, and the dangers of seeking freedom in a new world, Black Flower is an epic story based on a little-known moment in history."

Black Flower sounds quite interesting and as the author is a famous Korean novelist so no "cultural appropriation/lack of authenticity", I plan to give it a serious try soon.